Actually, I think that there are both benefits and costs to tightly controlled languages, and it's not clear at all that the costs outweigh the benefits. Indee

Actually, I think that there are both benefits and costs to tightly controlled languages, and it's not clear at all that the costs outweigh the benefits. Indeed, arguably C#'s great progress in the last decade compared to Java is due in large part to Microsoft's hegemony as opposed to Java's community process. Regardless, as I understand it (though IANAL) Oracle's copyright argument was over Android's reuse of Java's APIs (including signatures and documentation), not over the Java language itself. Basically they claimed that just like a cookbook is subject to copyright even though an individual recipe may not be, so should the collected Java API be even though individual method signatures wouldn't be.